While developing a Perl script this weekend to summarize Solaris zone usage, I wanted to display some type of status while my script did it's thing. My friend Clay came up with a cool way to do this, and I thought I would share it here in case others needed to do something similar. Here is the code:
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
## Initialize the index.
my $index=0;
## The characters to use as spinners.
my @spinners = ("-", "\", "|", "/");
my $totalspinners = $#spinners + 1;
## Turn on autoflush.
$ `| = 1;`
print "Factoring primes: ";
while (1) {
print " $spinners[$index++ % $totalspinners]";
sleep 1;
}
## If you were to exit the loop, turn off autoflush.
$ `| = 0;`
There may be a better way to do this (adding an additional module isn't an option), but I have yet to find it. Niiiiiice!